Masaaki Kurosu

Masaaki Kurosu is a professor of the R&D Department of National Institute of Multimedia Education (NIME) of MEXT, the ministry of education. He is also a head of Department of Cyber Culture and Society of the Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI). Before coming to NIME and SOKENDAI on September of 2001, he was a professor at the Faculty of Information of Shizuoka University from April of 1994 where he taught the HCI and the usability engineering. Until then, he was working for Hitachi Ltd. at the Design Center from 1988 to 1994 and at the Central Research Laboratory from 1978 to 1988.
He studied the experimental psychology and the psychological measurement at the Ph.D. course and the master course of graduate school of Waseda University. He graduated Waseda University in 1971.
He developed sHEM (structured Hueristic Evaluation Method), DTM (Dual Task Model), NEM (Novice-Expert ratio Method), and other usability evaluation methods, and now he is interested in the research method for the context of use and is engaged in the development of MSM (Micro Scenario Method). He was also engaged in the methodological development of interaction design, the LISP programming system, and the Japanese word processor.
He is now a president of NPO HCD-Net that promotes the human-centered design or the usability engineering in Japan.
He is an (co-)author of 27 books, wrote more than 30 articles and gave conference presentations of more than 200. He is a member of ACM SIGCHI, SIGDOC, UPA, HFES, IEEE Computer Society, APS, IPSJ, HIS, JES, JSD, JPA, and JCSS.
He served as a conference chair for APCHI'98 and INTERACT'01. He is a member of TC159/SC4/WG6 and IFIP/TC13, and is a board member of IWIPS.

This article presents an outline of information on the usability activities in Japan with a focus on the last 10 years. Although there were many activities in academia, substantial efforts were made in industry, and both activities coincided to form unique usability engineering in the country. Because of the language barrier that exists in many Japanese usability engineering professionals, just a few works have been presented at international conferences. This is the reason why the tried to summarize in English the usability engineering activity in Japan.

One reason why the video conference system has not yet widely used is the lack of the evidence that will convince us its cost-performance compared to the face-to-face meeting. Reality is a key concept to describe the performance of the system. Previous researches on the video conference system had a tendency to focus on the hardware and software aspects of the system. But few of them studied the human side of the system, i.e. how the reality can be measured or how physical parameters may affect the degree of the reality. In this study, we tried to fix the independent and dependent variables relating to the reality and performed a psychological experiment on some of these variables.

In Japan, several of the academic associations are supporting research activity on the human interface from various approaches (e.g., information processing, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, human factors, etc.). Among them, the Technical Committee (TC) for Human Interface of the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers (SICE) is a representative one in the size of its membership and the variety of the activities. Based on technical success of sponsoring a symposium on Man-Machine Interface from 1982 to 1984, SICE decided to establish an independent committee on this subject in 1984. After discussions on the direction of the activity, the Technical Committee reached a decision to name it the Human Interface TC rather than the Man-Machine Interface TC to reflect an interest in a broad range of subjects. In 1986, the committee began to operate as an independent TC within SICE.

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